Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais
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So, basically, this hinges on how many people this makes think (Contra) and how many people this annoys enough to loath associating with the underlying cause (Zichao)...
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Yes. But the error that annoys me more is being made when people assert as if it were obvious tha everyone would see it as they see it, negatively. Thats arrogant, presumptious and foolish.
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As to the Apartheid regime, iirc, it was the industrial boycott and then the strikes in-country which really broke the white regime. Boycotting sports is a nice symbol but, technically, it doesn't do much so I am not sure that saying "Hey, I want to see the SA rugby team play even if the SA regime keep Black people down back at home" really add to active support to the SA regime.
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Well, actually,as you know I don't think either of those were as significant as actual armed resistance, but the sports thing does play a role. Becaise everyone always wants to think of themselves as a good person, a huge amount of effort was put into rationalising why oppression was necessary. As Chomsky neatly summed it up:
"There has always been racism. But it developed as a leading principle of thought and perception in the context of colonialism. That's understandable. When you have your boot on someone's neck, you have to justify it. The justification has to be their depravity. It's very striking to see this in the case of people who aren't very different from one another. Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, the earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in the same terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren't human. They weren't like us. We had to crush and destroy them. No. It has to do with conquest, with oppression. If you're robbing somebody, oppressing them, dictating their lives, it's a very rare person who can say: "Look, I'm a monster. I'm doing this for my own good." Even Himmler didn't say that. A standard technique of belief formation goes along with oppression, whether it's throwing them in gas chambers or charging them too much at a corner store, or anything in between. The standard reaction is to say: 'It's their depravity. That's why I'm doing it. Maybe I'm even doing them good.' If it's their depravity, there's got to be something about them that makes them different from me. What's different about them will be whatever you can find."
The sports boycott had the effect of puncturing those efforts. They made it unavoidably clear that the rest of the world did not agree, that we were bad people in their eyes. That produced a kind of constant white noise of stress and hassle and self-consiousness. If the rest of thew wrold had simply condoned what SA was doing, then far fewer white people would have ever come to question the "necessity" of apartheid, or take part in the struggle against it.
Israel at the moment enjoys a great deal of psychological support. They are getting the approval that SA did not get, and that has contributed to their ability to be intractable and inflexible.
And so my point stands. No matter what you do, there'll always be some solipsistic fool who can't see the big picture, but only resent how it affects them. And they will complain and whinge that whetever it is is "harming the cause" because they fiundamentally lack the imagination to realise that other people are not as narrowly self-centred as they are. These carpers and whiners can and should be ignored.
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